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XXIII
Crystal Roe
2024This Culminating Experience (CE) highlights the valleys that exist and occur in life, emphasizing that no matter the depth of the valley, there is always a response to it. The artist skillfully infuses the sounds of Afrobeats, Amapiano, Jersey Club, and R&B, blending these genres with personal experiences to present listeners with a profound theme of redemption and grace. This theme underscores the universal need for everyone to both give and receive grace, whether to themselves or others, throughout life's journey.
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Year of the Dragon
Zach Santos
2024I view each musical project I release as a personal timestamp that marks a specific milestone in my life, showcasing my influences, my skills in songwriting and production, as well as the evolution of my lyrical voice. My new EP ‘Year of the Dragon’ is no different in that aspect. Blending the sounds of a couple of my previous albums while presenting that in a refreshing and nuanced style. This record is an intersection of intricate chordal guitar parts, hooky singer songwriter music, and modern hip hop / R&B loop based production. The name of the EP is a symbol for the growth I'm looking to experience this year in my music and in my career. As I step out of the academic world and enter the professional music industry in LA I am so excited to be represented by a new album that I fully created and own 100%. The ‘Year of the Dragon’ EP is a showcase of my growth as a songwriter and producer while diving into new inspirations, new vulnerable topics, and new sounds overall
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环形山(Impact Craters)
Emma Shang
2024During the one year Songwriting & Production program in Berklee NYC, I gained lots of new skills, and by implementing them, I finished my first Extended Play (EP) — 环形山 (Impact Crater). The EP is a combination of acoustic and electronic elements, which is also a combination of what I used to do and what I learned this year. Many of them were made across three softwares including Logic Pro X, Ableton Live, and Pro Tools, to break the inertial thinking process of production and genre limitations. Since it is a fully Mandarin EP, future plans are specifically designed based in the Chinese music industry context.
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What is the Matrix?
Cunyuan Shao
2024The project "What is the Matrix?" explores personal beliefs and the intricate relationship between the physical and inner worlds. Using music as a tool, this project allows for a traversal through different times and spaces, offering a temporary escape from perceived reality and a glimpse into the underlying truths of the universe. This journey encompasses personal growth, artistic discovery, and the practice of integrating artistry into daily life. This reflection paper provides an honest assessment of the successes, challenges, and lessons learned throughout the development of this project, offering insight into both the creative process and personal journey of the artist.
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庙彼生花 Flowers blooming on the other side
Yujie Shao
2024An artist EP that has 6 songs in Mandarin targeting Chinese pop music market. The songs are in the genres of indie pop, city pop and electronic.
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SAFAR
Chaitanya Shelar
2024My CE is a story. A story derived from all my favourite inspirations which has the backing of 5 songs that express the emotion and different plot points. Media currently is all about delivering an immersive experience. That experience in my CE is to remind people about the times they felt connected and happy in their life. To give a summary of the story, it is about the friendship shared between two guys. How they became friends, how their bond grows and how they change as people in the journey they share. That is exactly what my CE is titled to be, ‘SAFAR’. It means Journey. To talk more about the characters, one is a person going through pessimistic feelings and self doubt while the other is an optimistic person. The story compels the journey of the transformation the pessimist mind goes through and has hope within for the good in the world. There are 5 songs as a part of my CE.
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Float On
Henry Shen
2024Building up a world from zero and displaying it with a camera are not easy. For visualizing the cutscenes, I struggled a lot and made many changes, discovered and inspired by many failed tests. The main two challenges are have no creative ideas and coding-wise troubleshooting for setting up stable diffusion. For solving these problems, I did researches, checked art station and pinterest for inspirations, got a lot help from GitHub. Finally my deliverables including promotional video, teaser, a 50-page art book, video-lighting integration project, unreal engine landscape preview and a physical model.
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Tangled Wind
Boram Shin
2024The name of the show is “Untangled Wind” which implies the complexity of emotions. I will shoot the six music videos in six different locations with six different choreography and customs. This is not an audience-based project but some of my friends can come and watch the behind the scenes on the shooting day. Each choreography represents the distinguished character in TV series/movies such as Anastasia, Beauty and the Beast, Behind the White Tower, Hwang Jini, A Tale of Two Sisters, and Women in the Sun. The vision of the project is for viewers to “be the character”. These days, people do not have enough time, energy, and interests in others and even themselves. When they watch my music video, I want them to escape from reality and focus on the different emotion such as happiness, sadness, fear, envy, and horror while enjoying the performance. Personally, these six characters had the big influence on my childhood as I have watched them more than 40-50 times. I found them intriguing because the most of them are hard to be clearly defined as either “good” or “bad”. Therefore, I want the audience to focus on the mood and vibe of the choreography.
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HEY! DON'T HIDE
Zhenye Shi
2024HEY! DON’T HIDE! I CAN SEE EVERYTHING... I know that many people like to escape. But it doesn’t mean that we can solve the problem by escaping some conflicts or dark sides. No matter where we hide, all problems will still be there. So why not...CATCH IT, and KILL IT! Open the curtain directly and face the fear in your heart. A sober person can’t pretend to sleep all the time. In my CE, the styles of different songs are very different. They include post-rock, indie rock, gothic, pop, cinematic, triphop, folk music ect. And many songs have a certain degree of creep vibe. As the vocalist for all songs, I have done some analysis on my vocal part. I think my vocal=30% mysterious+30% creepy+20% scary+20% sweet, which fits my personal brand of creepy girl and scary doll very well.
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Kapu!
Josefin Silèn
2024KAPU!: a new musical KAPU! is a new musical comedy following disillusioned yoga teacher Summer who moves to Hawaiʻi to put down roots after a lifetime of traveling. However, sleepy rainy Hilo is not the island paradise she dreamed it would be. Her dreams are upended when she, and her local neighbor and polar opposite Charlie, are cursed by two Hawaiian gods who doom their businesses to fail. Together, Summer and Charlie must overcome their differences to overcome the curse. Using a contemporary pop rock score accentuated with Hawaiian folk music and island pop music such as funk and reggae, this show interprets Hawaiian mythology from a local tradition. Josefin and Sydney co-wrote book, music, and lyrics for the first full draft of this new musical during the BerkleeNYC program. This culminated in a table read and a 15-minute showcase of selections from the full draft performed live with four actors and rhythm section.
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Coterie of Voices
Anju Sreekanth
2024‘Coterie’ means an intimate and often exclusive group of people with a unifying common interest or purpose. And this project is called “Coterie of Voices” because different voice recordings have been used to create all the elements in the tracks and yet they don’t sound like voice post processing, making it ironic but completely logical. Over 25 people were recorded for this project which also led to the numerous sample packs as a by-product of this project. The relationship between the real and unreal elements in the world, the organic and illusionary things around us is another main idea behind the concept of this project which has a crucial part of the live performance aspect of this project. The purpose of this project is to use just voice to create whole tracks which includes an immense amount of sound design and to create a unique fusion of Afro-beat music & Experimental electronic music.
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Hijo Del Sol
Pablo Trujillo
2024‘Hijo Del Sol’, Spanish for “Son Of The Sun” and the title track of this 8-song album, was written as a metaphor to portray a person being born from the light of the sun after a period of great darkness. This whole album encapsulates the image of rebirth, from the ashes of grief and heartbreak into the embers of newfound motivation and hope. The loss of a loved one can leave a wound so deep in a person that it can last for years, and the grieving stages come and go until eventually there is acceptance (what some may call “moving on”). This is true when losing a person in death but also at the end of a love relationship, both of which were experienced by Pablo Trujillo prior to his journey to Berklee’s New York City campus, where he started working on the songs that eventually became Hijo Del Sol, his Culminating Experience (CE).
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Love//Loss
Asher Vemagiri
2024Love is oft considered the universal theme, as seen in stories from every culture and time. Perhaps more ubiquitous, however, is the Loss that comes afterward — a result of having loved. In this way, Love//Loss explores Loss's impact on the human condition through the medium of live music performance. Whether it's the death of a loved one, the falling out of a relationship, or anything that leaves a space in our life has the unique power to compel us to confront our imperfect humanity. Love//Loss takes the audience on a journey from Status Quo, the Realization of loss, to a state of Alone*. The audience reflects on their Losses while sharing in the togetherness of the community at BerkleeNYC. This exploration is venue- and community-specific: Love//Loss incorporates the student body's stories, tragedies, and triumphs through interviews and surveys, turning that text and audio into data to drive visuals and memorials. This event is deeply personal to the intended audience. Through this simplicity and personalization, Love//Loss aims to connect on the deepest level with the audience and create an experience of hope and togetherness in the community.
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Letting Out the Factory Smoke
Roger Vidal
2024“Letting out the Factory Smoke” is a term used in electrical engineering. It is primarily used in a humorous way in the presence of a caustic fire due to electrical over stress in a circuit. Basically things start to smoke and we let out the “magic smoke” from a component. We say this as the part loses what makes it work. I felt this was aptly named for my own work as I did physically build my own compressor– and absolutely messed up more than once. Many things went wrong during my CE and I wanted to lean into that. It also brings in the heavy themes of merging contemporary music production with analog, and using technology to make an artistic voice. The original thesis statement of my CE was using technology, and building it, into something that can be felt, a sonic fingerprint. Which it remained to be, but evolved into more and more as I had to modify as things evolved into what was eventually presented.
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Fracture
Arthur Walsh
2024My culminating experience (CE) at Berklee College of Music has been a transformative journey, focused on writing from personal experiences. I personified the emotions from these stories into characters and created miniature worlds around each one. These worlds are deeply personal and are brought to life through unique vocal production and innovative techniques. My work blends elements of folk, rock, and electronic music, resulting in a distinctive "Folktronica" style. The production emphasizes doubling acoustic guitars and vocals, and blending traditional acoustic instruments with modern sounds and techniques. Throughout this process, I have acquired new skills in guitar playing, singing, and production, facing various challenges that have shaped my growth as a musician. These challenges, both expected and unexpected, have taught me resilience, adaptability, and the importance of intentionality in my creative process. This journey has not only improved my technical abilities but also deepened my understanding of music as a powerful tool for personal expression and connection.
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You & Me
Lefei (Oliver) Wei
2024The “You & Me” EP represents an artistic piece of approach to personify interpersonal relationships, with distinctive epitomes of such interpersonal relationships reflected in five songs. The EP constructs a story that can be broken down into five contrasting phases or chapters: crash, intimacy, distrust, detachment, and salvation, that follows the progression of time in a relationship.
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Nice Questions and Bad Advice
Benjamin Whetsell
2024This project is a six-song EP called Nice Questions and Bad Advice, with related promotional materials (cover art, videos, and so on). The EP is essentially a solo project: I wrote all but one song, I produced all six songs, and I performed practically every instrument. The EP also represents a departure from how I’ve created music: these are the first lyrically complete songs I’ve ever created, and they’re produced almost exclusively with real, acoustic instruments (I used to identify as an electronic music producer). The EP deals obliquely with my previous career as a lawyer, and its central message is the power of music to heal: to turn experiences that are ugly and unrelatable into an experience that’s beautiful and relatable. Lyrically, the EP deals with cycles, music as such, mortality, looking back, concealment, and absurdity. Musically, the EP includes unusual song forms, odd phrase lengths, odd meters, non-diatonic harmony, and unusual production. In addition to honing my lyricism and songwriting, throughout the creation of this EP I learned about co-writing, vocal and drum production, and studio recording. A written reflection offers more detail. I intend to release the EP publicly by December 2024.
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Coretta the Musical
Akili Wynn-Beavers
2024The musical Coretta is a story that’s meant to shine a light on the woman behind Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King. Coretta was a determined woman who had her own dreams of singing center stage in the classical world. Then, she met Martin, and the spotlight shifted to him, forcing her and her dream backwards into the shadow of another. With this story, we aim to educate and share the importance of what Coretta did, what she gave up, and how it changed the way she had envisioned her life going. The idea for Coretta the musical was formed in October 2023, and has morphed into a story that we believe everybody can relate to. Whether faced with struggles of racism, sexism, marriage, peer pressure or even in school competitions, we have all experienced it in some shape or form, and we can all find our spotlight, just like Coretta.
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Title: Gravity
Bining Xu
2024Title: Gravity is a sci-fi video game project focusing on world building and art style exploration. As a student with background in literature and screenwriting, I have thought about a space opera for years. And this project is the start point. For utilizing skills I have learned in this program, visualize the story has became the focus point.
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Bedtime Stories
Miranda Xu
2024Bedtime Stories is an artist and producer project by Miranda Xu (artist name Xiranda). It is an EP that contains 5 songs that each tells a magical realism story. The stories feature animals like cats, horses, and chimpanzees, but they essentially explore the meaning of human existence and our relationship with our inner selves and the surrounding world.
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PostHuman Aesthetic
Ajun Yao
2024This EP, titled PostHuman Aesthetic, was inspired by my anxious period at BerkleeNYC. The emotions and pressures I experienced were also felt by my classmates, which led me to ponder how we can coexist with our own emotions. If we can learn to adapt to them, prevent any adverse effects, and use them to develop ourselves, we might achieve a new form of human evolution. In this sense, the "post-human" might evolve into a biological entity with some characteristics of animals or plants, creating a form I call "post-human aesthetic." From a technical perspective, I wrote a script for this imagined future world. I used different tracks to represent various facets of this world, with each song addressing a different real-life topic. These topics include reputation, family relationships, self-recognition, multiple personalities, and the world's scenes. Beyond the tracks, this concept EP requires visual content support, so I used AI to generate cover images based on my script. Throughout the project, I realized that emotion is a powerful tool for creation because it comes from the depths of your heart. The production skills I've learned during this process, such as arranging, mixing, and mastering, have been invaluable. Designing harmonies was the most challenging part of the process due to my limited music theory knowledge. However, this limitation has given the tracks a unique flavor. I might write more tracks to complete the concept album and further enrich this imagined world.
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Ka Makana
Kiarra Young
2024Blending of the genres of hawaiian reggae and r&b through rhythmic stabs and soulful vocals
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